Month: January 2017

I bet you were not expecting me to use the Spanish Inquisition to help you write better headings. Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition and I’m guessing that it got your attention, or you would not have read this far. The Spanish Inquisition have several ways to help you improve your headings. Amongst their weaponry are such diverse elements as:

Fear

Fear the reaction of your readers. Counting your arguments is a good and powerful way to bring a point across, but these days everybody’s doing it and readers are starting to be really annoyed with yet another heading like, “Seven reasons why you should take up running”, “Five reasons why you should not eat bread”, “Three ways to improve your sales”, “Ten reasons why running is bad for you”, “Six reasons why you should avoid annoying your readers with boring headings”.

Surprise

Surprise your readers with a more interesting kind of heading. Something they were not expecting. You want to be read? Be different. Stand out from the crowd. Do something new. Boldly combine ideas that no one has combined before.

Ruthless efficiency

Use as few words as you can, but no fewer than you need. Headings are important because readers use them as a selection instrument. Am I going to read this blog post or not, is what they’re asking themselves, and if they don’t understand the heading they won’t read your post. Or your technical report. Or your scientific paper. So KISS: Keep It Short and Simple.

Fanatical devotion

Do not stop revising until you’ve got the perfect heading. This can take a long time. Consider leaving it alone for a couple of days if you’re not satisfied yet. Don’t throw away previous versions, you may want to revert back to them later on. Personally, I wrote approximately 20 headings for this post before I decided on this one and I still have them somewhere.

Nice red uniforms

If you are writing for a newspaper or a weblog you can do pretty much whatever you want with your headings (and even here we see a lot of people stealing and copying each other’s ideas, which is boring and which is why am writing this post). At work, uniformity may be expected more often (Look! We’ve been doing it like this for ages so it must be a good idea!). And even if we know that it’s the heading that stands out from the rest that will catch people’s eye, not all your headings can always be spectacularly different from the ones written by your colleagues. Some of you have company templates that you have to use and often a particular style is prescribed. But even if you have to do what everybody else is doing and they make you wear that uniform, at least try to make it a red one.

Writers who fail to take this advice seriously will be considered blasphemers and will be poked with soft cushions, with all the stuffing at one end. And if they don’t confess their blasphemy they will have to sit in a comfy chair until teatime.

At the end of your presentation, when you say “Are there any questions?”, you would expect that people might pick up that it’s time for questions. Most likely they don’t really need a visual aid to help them. Nevertheless, many beginning speakers seem to think that their audience need some sort of support, a visible confirmation of the fact that the speaker did indeed just say that the Q&A session is now open. I find this insulting.

Over the years I have been witness to many brave attempts at finishing presentations successfully. Some of them worked, some not so much. Let me give you an idea of what I have come across.

Some students use some sort of cartoon figure, or a cat or dog that looks particularly
puzzled. For extra effect it may have a question mark hanging over its head. Some use just the word “questions”. Occasionally I catch an animated version of these. Please don’t animate your last slide. It makes people nervous. They want to ask a question, but the slide is distracting them.

Some (many) show a summary of the steps they took during the presentation, basically giving an overview, but no content. Invariably, the last words these students utter are: “And then finally we had a conclusion. Are there any questions?” Thank you, no.

Some just keep whatever happens to be the last slide of the presentation. Could be anything. Sometimes it’s a list of things that went wrong during the project. Aargh!

Some students leave the last slide blank, thus giving their audience nothing to work with.

Let’s consider the purpose of your last slide. A wise man, probably Aristotle but there are bound to have been others, once said that the only reason why we organize presentations in the first place is to prepare the audience for the Q&A session. In other words, people are usually quite keen to ask questions. They only need a little nudge and off they go. But they do need you to give them something to go on.

As a speaker, you are also keen for them to ask questions, or you should be. An audience that is asking questions is proof of the fact that they found your presentation interesting. Of course you may prefer some questions to others, and of course you prefer the audience to ask questions that you actually know the answer to.

This is where that last slide comes in. What you do is you make sure that the information on the last slide will invite your audience to ask questions that you feel you can answer. Usually it’s your conclusions, maybe with a couple of supporting bullet points. Of course there is no guarantee, some people will have made notes, but there’s a good chance that this way the first couple of questions will deal with your last slide.

And then, when you’ve answered your last question, you click the remote to show your contact details on the screen and say: “Thank you very much for all your questions. I realise that there may be one or two questions that we haven’t addressed yet, or maybe you suddenly wake up tomorrow morning at 3 AM because you had a dream about a really good question that you forgot to ask today. Either way, please don’t call me but send an email to this address”.

Whatever you do, please avoid the word “questions” on your last slide, and certainly don’t show a kitten with a question mark over its head. I don’t care how cute it is!